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Topic: fake news - live (Read 1526 times)

the porn guys trolling for kids get caught by cops posing as kids.the u.s. reader gets caught by this cause social media does not tell you who you are actually talking to and stupid humans just pass it on as truth.sigh

Updated 13 hours agoThere is a version of nearly every major news story that Russia wants you to know.

And the Kremlin has constructed a massive network of social media profiles — humans and bots — to make sure its stories winds up at the top of Twitter or in your Facebook feed.

“Any time there is any kind of socially divisive issue out there, they tend to hop on that,” said Bret Schafer of the Alliance for Securing Democracy. “We've seen their ability to get behind a message and push it up into the more general discussion.”

Alliance for Securing Democracy, an initiative to guard against Russian and other efforts to undermine democracy and democratic institutions in the United States and Europe, monitors 600 Twitter accounts that are linked to, affiliated with or supportive of the Russian government. In the aftermath of major events, those accounts post tweets and stories that amplify topics more apt to tear America apart than bring it together in the face of tragedies, devastation or turmoil.

For example, stories and posts by the accounts about protests of the national anthem by NFL players sided with President Trump and were critical of the players, coaches and league. Criticism of Trump and the federal response to the devastation in Puerto Rico by San Juan's mayor was politically motivated, according to the accounts. And the shooter in Las Vegas on Sunday night that killed at least 59 and injured more than 500 had radical learnings.

The top link shared for most of the day Monday by the 600 Russian-affilitated accounts monitored by the Alliance for Securing Democracy was a story on www.truepundit.com, a conservative news site given a “Pants on Fire” score by PolitiFact and called “super-dubious” by Politico, that cites exclusive information from an unnamed FBI source that Stephen Paddock “had ‘radical leanings' when it came to politics.”“Any time there is a tragedy, there is ripe ground for disinformation,” said Schafer, coordinator for communications, social media and digital content for the Alliance for Securing Democracy. “Right now, I would say be very, very cautious of the news coming out.”

The 2016 election shone a spotlight on efforts by the Russian government to influence the United States' domestic affairs. Former FBI Director Robert Mueller is overseeing a federal investigation into Russian interference in the election. Trump's campaign is under scrutiny. On Monday, Facebook turned over more than 3,000 ads to congressional investigators that the company says were bought by Russia. Twitter will go before the Senate and House intelligence committees Thursday.

But Russia's meddling didn't start or end with the 2016 election. Nor will the use of social media for harmful and even criminal enterprises, said David Hickton, director of University of Pittsburgh's Institute for Cyber Law, Policy and Security and a former U.S. Attorney who mounted pioneering prosecutions of cyber criminals.

American officials know Russia has learned how to manipulate social media to spread false information, amplify contentious topics and garner sympathy, support and awareness for pro-Russia causes. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have been compromised, as have internet service providers, and they should cooperate with investigators to stop it, Hickton said.

“This is not something that we can pretend is not just happening,” Hickton said. “If fear and anger are being stoked by initiatives that are coming from our adversaries to sow discord in our country, we need to get a grip on that and stop it.”

Schafer said it might be too soon after the Las Vegas shooting to know how Russia might try to use it to manipulate Americans.

“As soon as it comes out what his motivation was — particularly if it appears to have come from a left-leaning background — you are quickly going to see a coordinated message around this,” Schafer said of the Russians.

He said to be wary of accounts that are relatively new and have lots of posts but few followers or friends. Any account filled with politics but void of family photos or posts about birthdays or other occasions should be suspect.

“Take a look at the person's account and see if it adds up to being a normal person,” Schafer said.

From what I've seen of interviews with Putin at least, it's not so much that he is trying to destroy America, as much as that he is simply trying to ignore it completely. He's spoken about getting together with China, India, and Brazil to come up with alternate reserve currencies to pay for oil and other things.

I know there are people like Soros around who are trying to create instability, yes; but a lot of the politicians I've seen now, seem to primarily be trying to route around America, rather than destroying it. The goal isn't so much to attack America, but simply to render it irrelevant by making different economic arrangements with other countries, which America simply won't be part of at all any more. In a sense, that is worse than war; it's indifference.

Communism is also active all over the place, at the moment. You only need to spend some time on Reddit to know that. Yet, despite being aware of that, I honestly don't think that Putin is leading the charge. I think he's a lot more interested in other things.

Google and Facebook have apologised after their algorithms led to the promotion of inaccurate information about the Las Vegas shooting.

Posts from a 4chan messaging board that falsely identified the gunman as an individual who was not involved were circulated online.

Google says the posts only appeared in its Top Stories section if users searched for the erroneous name.

Facebook said it took down the posts within minutes.

Speculation gone viral

The problem occurred when users began speculating about the identity of the gunman on 4chan, a controversial anonymous messaging board.The users named an individual on the Politically Incorrect message board, claiming that the person was a "far left loon" and a "social democrat".

The comments were picked up by several blogs and news sites, including an article by the right-wing political website, the Gateway Pundit.

Many users then searched for the erroneous name on Google. The internet giant's algorithms traced the original source of the story back to the 4chan message board and posted a link to it in the Top Stories section.

"Unfortunately, early this morning we were briefly surfacing an inaccurate 4chan website in our search results for a small number of queries," a Google spokesperson told the BBC.

"Within hours, the 4chan story was algorithmically replaced by relevant results. This should not have appeared for any queries, and we'll continue to make algorithmic improvements to prevent this from happening in the future."

However, Google said only a small number of search queries were made for the name, which suggests that not many people would have seen the 4chan link.

As for Facebook, the social network told the Associated Press that it began removing results relating to the Gateway Pundit and 4chan within minutes.

The Gateway Pundit's White House correspondent Lucian Wintrich told far-right conspiracy website Infowars that the article was only online for 10 minutes before it was taken down.

Despite Facebook's efforts to remove hyperlinks to the story, users had made screenshots of the incorrect story and continued to circulate these images online, which were harder to detect and take down."We are working to fix the issue that allowed this to happen in the first place and deeply regret the confusion this caused," a Facebook spokesman said.

Who is responsible?

Google and Facebook have been criticised several times in the last 12 months for promoting content later found to be false, particularly relating to breaking news events.Both tech giants have announced measures to fight inaccurate news in the last few months.

"Google and Facebook are much bigger than any media company now, but they insist that they are not publishers, that they are merely platforms, and as platforms, they don't need to take responsibility for their content," Prof Tim Luckhurst, head of Kent University's Centre for Journalism told the BBC."Governments create laws that allow broadcasters and newspapers to be sued, so it's up to the government to stand up to these websites and say that if anything relating to terrorism or false information is published, they can be sued."

Prof Luckhurst pointed out that in the past, Google and Facebook had been quick to tweak their algorithms when requested to do so by the Chinese government."Algorithms are not organic creations - they are the product of very clever software writers.

"They can tweak them when the Chinese government asks them to, they can tweak them to do target advertising, but if you ask them to tweak their algorithms in relation to terrorism or untruths, they say, 'We're not publishers.'"But they've demonstrated that they clearly can do it, and so they should do it."

Individuals who shared the content online could face legal action.

"It's for individuals to take responsibility for what they post on social media, this person could make a lot of money from suing all these people who shared the screenshot online," said Dominic Ponsford, editor of the Press Gazette.

"Google should be only indexing bona fide news sources - it should be straightforward to check what is a bona fide news source and what isn't."It's kind of astonishing that Google's not doing that, given the huge concern in America about fake news."

10/04/2017 05:44 pm ET Updated 3 hours agoWhy Misinformation Travels In The Wake Of Tragedies Like Las VegasDuring an emergent situation, rumors can have social and psychological consequences.

As Americans tried to make sense of Sunday night’s mass shooting in Las Vegas, where at least 58 people were killed and more than 500 were wounded, they faced a secondary challenge: weeding through the inevitable misinformation that cropped up in the minutes, hours and days following the initial reports of the shooting.

Putting aside hoaxes and intentionally misleading conspiracy theories, false information that spread after the Las Vegas massacre included social media users misnaming the gunman, incorrect information suggesting the gunman’s girlfriend was complicit in the shooting (law enforcement officials say she was out of the country at the time), and inaccuracies about Las Vegas’ gun control laws.

“Whenever people are in high-stress situations with a lot of uncertainty — there’s a lot of uncertainty in an emergent situation — it’s a natural response for people to engage in what we call sense-making,” Ahmer Arif, a researcher and Ph.D. student at the University of Washington who has studied online rumors, told HuffPost. “They’re going to come up with different hypotheses and explanations for what’s going on.”

As part of his research on online rumors, which has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal, Arif and his colleagues interviewed 15 individuals who unintentionally tweeted rumors or false facts during unfolding crisis situations.

One interviewee, who tweeted misinformation during the 2015 Paris attacks, remembered anxiety and uncertainty as the events developed:

It’s really hard to convey how little everyone knew. There were so many rumors flying around. Where there were attacks going on. How many attacks there were. Whether or not they were coordinated. Whether or not it was all a hoax or prank. No one knew anything for sure. The only thing people knew anything of at first was the thing that happened at the football stadium. But all the other little things happening in the different parts were kind of hearsay at first... things going around on Twitter about Les Halles, about the Louvre, about so many places in Paris that weren’t at all targets as it turned out.Some of the people who spread online rumors were journalists, while others did not work in media. “From both parties, what I sensed was first and foremost there was a lot of distress [from having spread misinformation],” Arif said. “There’s a stigma attached to rumoring.”

ome said they were unhappy about having propagated a false story, thus making things worse for victims’ families. Journalists also worried about the reputational stakes of having promoting misinformation.

Arif described rumoring as part of human nature. But in the era of mass communication, rumors can spread faster and farther than ever. Social media, in particular, has increased the consequences of spreading misinformation. “It makes its effects amplified to some extent and there’s a permanence at times,” Arif said. Or, as the old saying goes, a lie can run halfway around the world before the truth has got its boots on.

The effects of this can range from the social to the psychological. Here’s how misinformation might affect people trying to understand and process events like the Las Vegas massacre.

These new emails and documents, however, clearly show that Breitbart does more than tolerate the most hate-filled, racist voices of the alt-right. It thrives on them, fueling and being fueled by some of the most toxic beliefs on the political spectrum — and clearing the way for them to enter the American mainstream.

It’s a relationship illustrated most starkly by a previously unreleased April 2016 video in which Yiannopoulos sings “America the Beautiful” in a Dallas karaoke bar as admirers, including the white nationalist Richard Spencer, raise their arms in Nazi salutes.

These documents chart the Breitbart alt-right universe. They reveal how the website — and, in particular, Yiannopoulos — links the Mercer family, the billionaires who fund Breitbart, to underpaid trolls who fill it with provocative content, and to extremists striving to create a white ethnostate.

They capture what Bannon calls his “killing machine” in action, as it dredges up the resentments of people around the world, sifts through these grievances for ideas and content, and propels them from the unsavory parts of the internet up to TrumpWorld, collecting advertisers’ checks all along the way.

RETRACTED: Paddock's Girlfriend Used Two Social Security Numbers And Was Married to Two Men at the Same Time Newsweek NewsweekNewsweek Europe4 days ago

Newsweek has retracted its story that reviewed public records of Marilou Danley, the girlfriend of Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock.

The initial report was based on the marriage record of Danley, who was known under a different name when she married Geary Danley (like DUH !!! most women have a different name when they marry..idiot.!) in Clark County, Nevada. Newsweek mistakenly matched that record to a second public record of a different person.

The mistake was revealed when a Newsweek reporter re-interviewed a person who had initially declined to comment for our story.

Danley remains a "person of interest" in the shooting investigation of 59 people, including the gunman, Sunday night in Las Vegas.

SAN FRANCISCO — Google for the first time has uncovered evidence that Russian operatives exploited the company’s platforms in an attempt to interfere in the 2016 election, according to people familiar with the company's investigation.

The Silicon Valley giant has found that tens of thousands of dollars were spent on ads by Russian agents who aimed to spread disinformation across Google’s many products, which include YouTube, as well as advertising associated with Google search, Gmail, and the company’s DoubleClick ad network, the people said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss matters that have not been made public. Google runs the world’s largest online advertising business, and YouTube is the world’s largest online video site.

The discovery by Google is also significant because the ads do not appear to be from the same Kremlin-affiliated troll farm that bought ads on Facebook -- a sign that the Russian effort to spread disinformation online may be a much broader problem than Silicon Valley companies have unearthed so far.

Google previously downplayed the problem of Russian meddling on its platforms. Last month, Google spokeswoman Andrea Faville told The Washington Post that the company is "always monitoring for abuse or violations of our policies and we've seen no evidence this type of ad campaign was run on our platforms."

Nevertheless, Google launched an investigation into the matter, as Congress pressed technology companies to determine how Russian operatives used social media, online advertising, and other digital tools to influence the 2016 presidential contest and foment discord in U.S. society.

Google declined to provide a comment for this story. The people familiar with its investigation said that the company is looking at a set of ads that cost less than $100,000 and that it is still sorting out whether all of the ads came from trolls or whether some originated from legitimate Russian accounts.

To date, Google has mostly avoided the scrutiny that has fallen on its rival Facebook. The social network recently shared about 3,000 Russian-bought ads with Congressional investigators that were purchased by operatives associated with the Internet Research Agency, a Russian-government affiliated troll farm, the company has said.

Some of the ads, which cost a total of about $100,000, touted Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders and the Green party candidate Jill Stein during the campaign, people familiar with those ads said. Other ads appear to have been aimed at fostering division in United States by promoting anti-immigrant sentiment and racial animosity. Facebook has said those ads reached just 10 million of the 210 million U.S. users that log onto the service each month.

At least one outside researcher has said that the influence of Russian disinformation on Facebook is much greater than the company has so far acknowledged and encompasses paid ads as well as posts published on Facebook pages controlled by Russian agents. The posts were shared hundreds of millions of times, said Jonathan Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University.

In a blog post, Facebook wrote it is also looking at an additional 2,200 ads that may have not come from the Internet Research Agency.

"We also looked for ads that might have originated in Russia — even those with very weak signals of a connection and not associated with any known organized effort," the company wrote last month. "This was a broad search, including, for instance, ads bought from accounts with US IP addresses but with the language set to Russian — even though they didn’t necessarily violate any policy or law. In this part of our review, we found approximately $50,000 in potentially politically related ad spending on roughly 2,200 ads."

Meanwhile, Twitter said that it shut down 201 accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency. It also disclosed that the account for the news site RT, which the company linked to the Kremlin, spent $274,100 on its platform in 2016. Twitter has not said how many times the Russian disinformation was shared. The company is investigating that matter and trying to map the relationship between Russian accounts and well-known media personalities as well as influencers associated with the campaigns of Donald Trump and other candidates, said a person familiar with Twitter's internal investigation. RT also has a sizeable presence on YouTube.

Twitter declined to comment for this story.

Executives for Facebook and Twitter will testify before Congressional investigators on Nov. 1. Google has not said whether it will accept a similar invitation to do so.

U.S. intelligence agencies concluded in January that Russian president Vladmir Putin intervened in the U.S. election to help Donald Trump win. But Silicon Valley companies have received little assistance from the inte

Meanwhile, Twitter said that it shut down 201 accounts associated with the Internet Research Agency. It also disclosed that the account for the news site RT, which the company linked to the Kremlin, spent $274,100 on its platform in 2016.

Twitter "linked RT to the Kremlin"? How smart of them for noticing. It was created as part of the official Russian news agency, RIA Novosti.

What I find funny is that it looks like they are looking for Russian sources instead of identifying the sources of suspicious ads, so they are looking for Russian interference but only for Russian interference. Interference from any other sources is not being investigated.

“Any time there is any kind of socially divisive issue out there, they tend to hop on that,” said Bret Schafer of the Alliance for Securing Democracy. “We've seen their ability to get behind a message and push it up into the more general discussion.”

So.... your saying that the Democrats are saying "The Russians did it!" ?

Despite the fact that no evidence existed, Trump repeated the charge about the paid protesters while on stage during one of his rallies.

Well finding "Paid to protest" ads on Craigslist is easy and they are real. Anything form people needed to hold signs in front of a pet shop to Unions needing bodies to block access to construction sites. Sometime they want silent sign holders to show numbers, sometimes they want the 'beefy' type in case of trouble

Anyone who says all paid protest ads are fake just doesn't face reality Just pick any city craigslist and watch the "gigs" - "events" section

Quote

because Trump’s supporters were “easy to fool.”

Sounds prejudiced If you listen to the Man on the Street interviews it seems Democrats are just as easily fooled, especially the California ones

Effective immediately, Twitter will no longer permit advertising on the platform from Russia Today (which uses the moniker “RT”) or Sputnik.

Twitter announced the changes in a blog post Thursday morning, linking the companies’ accounts to “Russian efforts to interfere with and disrupt the 2016 Presidential election.” While advertising related to them will cease, the accounts themselves will remain in operation.

Both media outlets are backed by the Russian government and push political narratives favoring its officials. In January, a U.S. intelligence report concluded the two are arms of “Russia’s state-run propaganda machine.”

The social media outlet disclosed RT spent $274,100 on ads in 2016, and $1.9 million on ads since joining the platform in 2011. Twitter said Thursday it will donate those funds to an external group researching “the use of Twitter in civic engagement and elections, including use of malicious automation and misinformation.”

RT responded to the decision in an opinion piece, calling the accusations that it’s seeking to influence people via advertising on Twitter “absolutely groundless.”

The Russian outlet claimed the real culprit here is Twitter itself, blaming the company for recruiting RT to spend heavily on ads during the 2016 election.

“Twitter pushed RT for a large ad buy for the 2016 US election, but the channel declined the offer,” wrote Deputy Editor-in-Chief Kirill Karnovich-Valua.

Sputnik Editor-in-Chief Margarita Simonyan called Twitter’s decision “regrettable,” and reported that Russian President Vladimir Putin vowed the country would respond “swiftly and symmetrically.”

On Tuesday, Twitter announced a number of changes to how it treats advertising on the network, with an eye on political advertising in particular.

The steps, which aim to make political messaging more transparent, follow a similar push by Facebook. Both companies are making policy changes after the federal government launched investigations into their conduct during the 2016 election. The actions also come amid a fear of increased government regulation of platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google.

Twitter has been under heightened scrutiny from lawmakers, who very publicly criticized the company in late September, after closed-door briefings indicated it had not done enough to investigate its role in misinformation campaigns during 2016 election.

Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate intelligence panel, called its presentation “inadequate on almost every level,” adding Twitter’s efforts “showed an enormous lack of understanding ... of how serious this issue is, [and] the threat it poses to democratic institutions.”

Troublingly, both Twitter and Facebook have been scrubbing their platforms of data ― and, in Facebook’s case, thousands of potentially incriminating posts ― that’s invaluable to researchers investigating the Russian disinformation campaign.